Cry Rape: The True Story of One Woman's Harrowing Quest for Justice (19 page)

Maples appealed to Eisen: “I believe that in your role as his supervisor, you have a responsibility to rein him in.” Eisen, a fair-minded and deliberate fellow with whom I had worked for a decade, met with Maples, Woodmansee, and Nicks for three hours in late July. I was not allowed to attend. Eisen felt the trio raised some valid concerns about my lack of objectivity—I had become vocal in my belief that Patty was telling the truth—but was not persuaded that my reporting was inaccurate or unfair. He declined their demand, and my offer, that I stop covering the case.

On July 29 the state crime lab reported the results of its DNA testing. Mark, Doug, and Dominic were all conclusively excluded as the source of the semen found on Patty’s bedsheet. The police and prosecution had failed to explain away evidence suggesting that Patty was raped.

Harlowe’s reaction was to demand that the charges be dismissed and insist that Patty receive a public apology. He even considered refusing to accept a dismissal and force the case to trial, unless an apology was
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received. He soon backed down from this when he realized, much to his dismay, that dismissal was not assured.

“The posture they’re taking is one of concern that she falsely accused Dominic,” he told me. “They’re still treating her as a defendant and that’s an outrage.” During an August 4 meeting with Karofsky and Nicks, Harlowe argued that the district attorney’s office, which he once headed, had a moral obligation to right the wrong that had been done to Patty. Their response, he related, was “mechanical”—a reiteration of Aulik’s ruling that the police tactics were proper. Harlowe set up a meeting between Nicks and Patty, whom no one from the district attorney’s office had ever met or spoken to. Nicks agreed, then canceled.

By all outward signs, the office still planned to take the case to trial, the date of which had again been pushed back, to September 1. Subpoenas were sent to sixteen people—an amazing number for a misdemeanor obstruction charge—including all of the police officers involved as well as Carol, Dominic, Dora, Mark, Misty, and Brenda. Jill Poarch was summoned to a trial-preparation session in the district attorney’s office, where it was explained to her that the police sometimes use ruses in the course of their work.

Meanwhile Schwartz took her investigation to a new level, in a call to Patty’s sister Sue. As Harlowe related this contact, the detective

“asked if Patty made up being molested as a child” and tried getting the phone number for Patty’s former stepfather, to check this out with him.

(Sue would later testify that Schwartz also asked whether her sister might fabricate a sexual assault.) Harlowe was furious: “This has gone too far.”

For Patty, the idea that police would try to find the man who molested her when she was a little girl to give him an opportunity to say she lied about that, too, was more than she could bear. Sobbing, she told Harlowe she was willing to do anything—even plead guilty and go to jail—to end this nightmare. Harlowe called Nicks to voice his outrage.

Her reaction: “She groaned and said, ‘Oh, my God.’” The district attorney, to her credit, brought an immediate end to this line of inquiry. “I think she was genuinely offended,” said Harlowe.

Still, Nicks’s office refused to concede that Patty was not a criminal.

Harlowe, frustrated, filed a motion seeking to compare DNA from the recovered semen against a data bank of convicted sex offenders. A 132

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match, he argued, “would further exculpate the defendant by establishing not only that she had been raped but the identity of her assailant.”

The police, through Detective Schwartz, made an effort to have this done. But she was told the sample was insufficient for such analysis.

Woodmansee’s reaction to the DNA results was even more strident than that of the district attorney’s office. He told Eisen, my editor, that on top of all the other things Patty lied about, she apparently had a lover whose identity she failed to disclose to police. When I shared this with Patty, she laughed. If only finding boyfriends were as easy as he imagined.

Patty, for her part, was devastated that her suspicions about Dominic were apparently incorrect. She had to admit to Misty that she had been wrong. Patty also felt as though she had let down people, myself included, who had regarded her suspicions as credible, and issued heartfelt apologies.

The state’s criminal prosecution of Patty ended not with a bang but a whimper. On Friday, August 21, eleven days before the scheduled trial, the Dane County District Attorney’s Office dismissed the obstruction charge. At Harlowe’s insistence, the words “with prejudice” were added in handwriting to the dismissal order, meaning the charge could not be refiled. The office, in trying to fax this dismissal order to Harlowe, accidentally faxed it to
Isthmus
—a fitting conclusion to this tragedy of errors.

Harlowe said the dismissal had the same significance as an acquittal and was pleased about that: “It’s over. She’s not going to be prosecuted anymore.” But he was troubled by the reluctance of the district attorney’s office to admit error and apologize, saying prosecutors “missed an opportunity to resolve this with a little more class.”

In response to my requests for comment, the district attorney’s office issued a statement saying that the charge against Patty had been based on “the totality of circumstances” surrounding her reported sexual assault. This included a “lack of physical evidence,” “repeated changes in the account” she gave police, and the fact that she “subsequently behaved in a manner that was wholly incompatible” with her claim of sexual assault—that is, she didn’t act like a rape victim. When confronted, the alleged victim made what Judge Aulik deemed to be a voluntary confession. The discovery of semen at the scene, the statement said, did not prove that Patty was raped, only that “at some point someone left
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semen on the sheets.” Indeed, the only thing the semen established for sure was that the man she “named as her assailant” was innocent. But because the state could not prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt, the charges were dropped.

Patty wasn’t willing to let it go at that. She wanted the investigation into her rape reopened. “That sperm belongs to somebody and it isn’t anybody I know,” she remarked angrily after the charges were dismissed. “We have evidence that I was raped. What are they going to do about that?” There was, she noted, no apology of any sort. “They’re not even admitting they made a mistake.” Instead the district attorney’s office was proclaiming that she behaved like no rape victim should, kept changing her story, and falsely accused an innocent man.

Instead of feeling relief, Patty was overcome with pain. In the year since the rape, she had not been able to process what happened, to mourn. “I was never allowed the time,” she said. “I went straight from the terror of rape, right into working with police, right into defending myself. I got robbed of that chance to grieve.” Her ordeal was not over.

She had to reclaim her dignity and find the man who raped her.

On August 28, a second rally in support of Patty was held on the steps of the City-County Building. It was planned before the charges were dismissed, in anticipation of Patty’s trial, and about forty people turned out. One protester wore a T-shirt inscribed with the words, “You don’t act like a rape victim.” The main organizer, Theo Lesczynski of the campus-based Violence Prevention Advocates, said the local justice system was not serving victims: “Time and again we see them not believed when they go to the police, we see them intimidated . . . we see their cases not prosecuted.” Danielle McGuire, the Madison student whose reported rape was not pursued by the district attorney’s office, agreed, based on her experience: “No one wanted to listen. No one really cared.” Patty’s brother Bobby and sister Sue also spoke, with lingering anger, about what had happened.

Maples also did not feel as though the matter should be put to rest.

She wrote a column, at Eisen’s invitation, that was published in
Isthmus.

It was, like her earlier missive, an impassioned defense of the lead detective, who “did absolutely nothing wrong in investigating this case.”

Maples asserted that “some parts of Patty’s story were not true, and any reasonably trained detective would have come to the exact same 134

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conclusion that Tom Woodmansee did.” She expressed no sympathy or concern for Patty, who even the prosecution admitted may have been raped.

For Patty, this column was one of the sharpest slaps she had yet endured. She wrote Maples a letter saying that while there may have been inconsistencies in her account, she had been truthful to Woodmansee, except for her recantation. Patty recounted how Woodmansee, in questioning her, had been “forceful and impatient,” suggesting they might have to go into the bedroom and “role-play this thing.” She described how she recanted only after the detectives subjected her to “psychological terrorism.” She noted that she never decisively named Dominic as her assailant, despite pressure from Woodmansee to do so. It was only after he abandoned her case, without looking into other suspects, that she reached this conclusion, an honest mistake: “Mind you, I am in the restaurant business, not police science and, more important, it is not my job.” Patty closed by asking Maples to provide a list of things she had lied about.

Maples never provided this list, or even a single example, but she did leave a message on Patty’s answering machine offering to meet. Patty, at Harlowe’s emphatic urging, did not respond. But Maples’s longing to justify the actions of police found another outlet: she arranged for me to meet with Woodmansee, face-to-face.

18

A Question of Standing

Detective Woodmansee and Lieutenant Maples arrived at
Isthmus
at 1 p.m. on the last day of August 1998. Eisen, who was present at their insistence, led the pair into a basement conference room. No one shook hands. The purpose of the meeting, Maples explained, was to tell me the many reasons police had for concluding that Patty was lying.

During the next several hours Woodmansee proceeded to go through a long list of reasons, working off of several pages of typewrit-ten notes. My attempts to ask questions or make counterpoints were mostly rebuffed. I did manage to ask whether Woodmansee had said, on October 2, “If you thought I was good working for you, you should see me working against you.” He admitted saying something to this effect but implied it had a softer cast. I also inquired about Susan Pankow, who four months after the dismissal of charges still had not been re-charged, contrary to what Maples had indicated was likely. Woodmansee, in derisive reference to the district attorney’s office, said that “if they want to let her get away with it,” there was nothing he could do.

This was his perspective: not that he messed up in getting a child-care provider to think she broke an infant’s leg in a scenario a doctor immediately discredited, but that prosecutors had deliberately decided to let a dangerous criminal go free.

Woodmansee went through his list of reasons, one by one. Patty had said the wrong things and had the wrong reactions. There were all sorts of discrepancies in her account and no evidence in support. I noted that I was familiar with many of these points, since Harlowe had shown me a copy of Woodmansee’s forty-eight-page report. He insisted on going 135

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through the list. After about two hours, Eisen left the session, citing a prior commitment. Later, he expressed bewilderment with Woodmansee’s performance, how he seemed not to distinguish between major and minor points, as though what mattered most was how many he could cite.

When Woodmansee finally finished, I asked whether he thought my own impressions of the case, based on my contacts with Patty and others, might have some validity. He allowed for this possibility. I said I considered Patty credible and consistent, and that my reading of his report led me to conclude that he had botched the investigation. At this, both Woodmansee and Maples stormed out of the office. (Later, when he was asked under oath about this encounter, Woodmansee replied, “I wouldn’t describe it as much of a conversation. It was a discussion in which he did most of the talking. . . .”) Now that the charges were dismissed, few people wanted to revisit what had happened. Mayor Bauman followed through on her earlier pledge to seek an investigation into the matter but asked that it be done internally, by the police. Becky Westerfelt of the Rape Crisis Center declined to push the issue, saying her agency’s ability to do its job depended on maintaining good relations with the police and district attorney’s office. Westerfelt even directed Erin Thornley of the Wisconsin Coalition Against Sexual Assault not to comment publicly about Patty’s case. Thornley found this typical of the frustrating concessions advocates for assault victims had to make to maintain funding.

Patty, however, was having a harder time putting this matter behind her. Now, besides a painful personal history, debilitating disability, fractured relationships, and struggling businesses, she had to deal with the emotional fallout from her experiences with the police and justice system. She began seeing a clinical psychologist, Nina Bartell, whom Harlowe had recommended. Bartell did forensic work as well as psy-chotherapy and had extensive experience with survivors of sexual assault. She tried to help Patty deal with her stress, trauma, and need to pursue justice in a way that did not consume other aspects of her life.

As part of this process, Patty began writing a journal to help her sort out what had happened. In her large, downward-slanting script, she penned a detailed account of the rape, sexual assault exam, the day at Mark’s house, and her initial meeting with “Detective Tom.” That was
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as far as she got. The rest—including October 2—was still too painful.